Windows 7 will officially be released on October 22, but PC World has already given the new operating system a side-by-side spin with Vista and concluded that it's only "marginally faster" than its older sibling.

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In their performance test, the site "found an increase in speed, though the overall improvement [over Vista] wasn't dramatic." One area where 7 did see significant improvement over Vista was in disk performance.

For example, in our hard-disk-intensive WorldBench 6 Nero test—in which we create a series of images of an optical disc and then save them—every PC we tested showed an improvement [in Windows 7]. In our comparison of the 64-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7, the IdeaPad Y530 performed the test twice as quickly with the newer OS. Meanwhile, our Gateway T-6815 was almost two and a half times faster, going from a time of 1648 seconds to complete the test on Windows Vista to a time of 667 seconds on Windows 7.

As for boot-up and shutdown speeds, the tests saw mixed results—depending on the hardware used, sometimes Vista booted faster, other times Windows 7 did.

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Browse the full post for the complete results. Despite PC World's tests, most new Windows 7 users at least perceive speed improvements over Vista, which is what most users will care about anyway. If you've been using Windows 7 RC or Beta, let's hear what you've felt about its relative speed in the comments.